In a general way, with potatoes and with other things that you want good and plenty, get specific directions and follow them.  Most people won’t read directions; more can’t follow them.  Those people have their knives out for “book farmers and professors,” but you can’t improve on experience and experiment by the light of laziness or of nature.

A delicate jelly is made out of the red outer pulp of rose berries.  It would be romantic to develop a Rose fruit from those seed pods, as the peach was developed from the almond.  We have invented stranger fruits than that, such as the Logan-berry and the pomato.

But there is better chance for profit in doing the old things better, especially when the experiment costs little or nothing

You can have a strawberry garden on your roof or even on a balcony.  This need not be costly.  Clinch all the nails on the inside of a stout barrel.  Bore half a dozen two-inch holes in the bottom, or put in a layer of stones, for drainage.  Bore a row of eight holes about eight inches from the bottom of the barrel and about eight inches apart.  Eight inches above this bore a second row of holes “staggered,” and a third eight inches above those.  Pile several old tomato cans with perforated bottoms one on the other in the center of the barrel:  these should be the height of the barrel and placed upright in its middle.  This is the conductor down which water should be poured at intervals before the soil gets quite dry.  Fill the barrel with soil made of one half loam and one half well-rotted manure.  Be sure the manure is not fresh.  A little bone meal is a good addition.

Now plant the first row of strawberry plants ("ever-bearing” are best, though they don’t ever-bear).  Put each plant inside, spread the roots, and pull the leaves of each out through one of the holes.  Press the soil down firmly around each root.  Repeat the process for the other two rows; fill the barrel and set say six plants on the top.  That will give you thirty plants, which should grow ten to twentyfive quarts of fine berries, or more.  The illustration makes the holes twelve inches apart—­for big leafy plants.

If there are any more, those will be you.  Anyhow, you will know a lot about strawberries at the end of the season.  Other things can be grown in the same way.

Better than growing vegetables, or where dry land can’t be obtained, is to raise some crop like water cress that usually comes from a distance.

Often an otherwise poor season will help a specialty.  One year wet weather jumped the price of mint and it sold at double prices.  Hot, dry weather is required to make it produce its best.

Most of the mint produced in this country for peppermint oil is grown in Michigan.  More than 4000 acres are reported from a single county.  Mint oil is worth about $3.50 a pound and costs about a dollar to produce.  Nice bright dried leaves sell for about 15 cent a pound.